UiPATH
DIGITAL REPORT 2020
INNOVATION IN AUTOMATION AND THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 IN ASSOCIATION WITH
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UiPath: INNOVATION IN AUTOMATION AND THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 WRITTEN BY
GEORGIA WILSON PRODUCED BY
BEN MALTBY
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Chris Duddridge, Area Vice President and Managing Director, UiPath (UK and Ireland), discusses automation trends, innovation and the impact of COVID-19
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rior to joining UiPath, Chris Duddridge spent the past 20 years working within the HR, payroll and ERP software sales
market. Chris has previously worked for Sage and Deltek, before joining UiPath a year and a half ago as RVP for enterprise sales and is now Area Vice 04
President and Managing Director. “What initially drew me to UiPath was its people and being a part of a new emerging technology sector which was growing faster than any other I’d ever experienced. It also helped that RPA and intelligent automation had become pervasive across every industry and at every level within the business from the board agenda to the subject matter experts. I started off leading our enterprise sales team gaining a very quick and valuable induction to what was driving the agenda for automation from some of our largest clients. I’m now very lucky to represent UiPath UK & Ireland across all business functions from our sales engagements with new clients, but also our existing account management, Pre-Sales, Customer Success, and Partner
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“ Just four short years ago, it was a Romanian startup whose co-founders were driven by this vision of making work fun again. There were humble beginnings and this culture of staying humble, accepting feedback and seeking to improve, remaining obsessed with our customers’ success still permeates our present ethos” — Chris Duddridge, Area Vice President and Managing Director, UiPath (UK and Ireland)
channels. I’m incredibly fortunate to have an amazing team, who obsess over our customers’ projects and objectives, which makes it a great deal easier for me when we work to amplify
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our approach across our marketing and PR channels,” says Duddridge. “UiPath is very different to other companies,” comments Duddridge. “Just four short years ago, it was a Romanian startup whose co-founders were driven by this vision of making work fun again. There were humble beginnings and this culture of staying humble, accepting feedback and seeking to improve, remaining obsessed with our customers’ success still permeates our present ethos. This vision of shaking up the workplace in order to free up employees from the mundane part of office work with the help of software robots and letting
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07 them focus on value-added work like
a 500,000-member strong global
analysis, creative activities, and stra-
community of RPA developers. We
tegic tasks producing revenue impact
were the first company to offer free
made UiPath the globally successful
download of our community edition
company it is today. Dedicated to what
product – software developers, schools
we like to call accelerating human
and universities, NGOs, small compa-
achievement, we focus on the whole
nies have free access to work with
narrative not just on the commercial
our software robots. On one hand,
gains. UiPath knew it was going to be
we were able to garner valuable feed-
disruptive from the get-go, and we
back and improve on our product so
maintained a steadfast commitment
that it responds to the most diverse
to democratising access to RPA and
range of business cases, but we have
digital skills – through the free online
also been creating the essential work-
training platform UiPath Academy,
force to enable our customers to
and the continuous investment into
achieve a greater outcome with their w w w.ui pat h . com
U i PAT H
08 automation journeys. And we paired
our robots to respond to increasingly
this with a focus on creating a strong
complex processes and demands,
ecosystem of partners – an essential
embedding into our platform artificial
way of taking our end-to-end automa-
intelligence and machine learning
tion platform to customers and having
algorithms, task and process mining,
it service their goal.”
advanced analytics that allow the robots to learn and execute more.
CURRENT TRENDS WITHIN ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION
Little did we know we were actually priming our product for the number
“In market terms, RPA is the orches-
one trend Gartner predicted for 2020
tration capabilities of digital assistants
– hyper automation. This is now top of
– software robots that help people
mind for the entire industry, and it’s
perform their daily job on a case by
end-to-end approach. Rather than
case basis. Our focus during the
a one and done approach, organisations
last two-three years was to enable
are looking for a true transformation
for business strategies, which can
global pandemic. With more people
be captured in four key pillars: digital
working from home than ever and
transformation, enhancing employee
unprecedented challenges in terms
experience, improving the customer
of supply and demand or customer
service, and reducing risk and increas-
grievances (think aviation or call cen-
ing compliance” says Duddridge.
tres here), relying on technology for
“All these are even more fundamental
remote on-boarding, or sorting huge
for CEOs in the current climate while
backlogs of requests, or staying compli-
business models are reshaped by the
ant takes centre stage.”
E X E C U T I V E P R OF IL E :
Chris Duddridge Title: Area Vice President and Managing Director (UK and Ireland) Industry: Computer Software
Location: London, United Kingdom
Chris Duddridge is UiPath’s Area Vice President and Managing Director of UK and Ireland. He leads the UK and Irish teams in their mission to drive automation adoption in the region, helping customers achieve their automation goals using UiPath’s best-in-its-class hyperautomation platform. Chris previously held the position of RVP of Sales for UK and Ireland at UiPath, supporting UiPath during a period of hypergrowth. With more than 20 years in sales and technology, he is an experienced sales leader with a track record of helping small teams rise to market leader status. Passionate about technology, Chris is inspired by the potential of automation to transform the future of work. Highly motivated by teamwork, his key areas of interest are incentivising collaboration, creativity, and customer focus. w w w.ui pat h . com
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POWER UP YOUR DIGITAL OPERATIONS WITH INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION At Symphony, we’re the proven leaders in transforming front, middle and back office operations to boost overall efficiency, increase employee productivity and improve customer satisfaction.
“As organisations grappled with their
volumes of data. Think of the many hours
own specific challenges and disruptions
an employee spends copying and past-
whilst the pandemic unfolded, it quickly
ing data from one application to another
became clear that intelligent automation
or extracting information from one docu-
programmes facilitated faster decision-
ment and inputting it on an excel sheet
making, much needed agility and
for example. Think of the huge volumes
operational resilience to adjust to rapidly
of invoices a financial shared service
changing demands and pressures. Now,
centre needs to operate and how only a
as businesses begin to stabilise rela-
robot will pay the same attention to the
tive to the earliest days, smart business
5000th invoice as to the first. Usually the
leaders are reimagining operations with
challenges with implementing RPA are
radical agility baked in, and automation
that someone has to deliver it, a subject
at the forefront. They’ve also begun to
matter expert has got to share their intel-
realise that the decisions they take will
ligence around how that process works
shape many aspects of business and the
dealing with every nuance that comes
future workplace, not just for the remain-
with it. Which leaves you with the reality
der of the pandemic – but for years to
that robots are very clever, but they do
come.” added Jason Martindale, Vice
not replace cognitive skills. Humans still
President Sales at Symphony, a SYKES
retain the ascendancy in every automa-
company – a long-time UiPath partner
tion because they’re either the subject
specialising in IA implementation and
matter experts that need to program
managed services.
the automation, or they are the part of the loop which needs to train the robots
THE BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES OF AUTOMATION
to learn and continue to deliver value
“The benefits of automation are easy
challenges with delivering automation
to sell,” contemplates Duddridge, “eve-
revolve around firstly having enough
rything that can be automated, will be
people to dedicate to delivering that
automated as long as it’s process led,
journey, scaling up the RPA centre
rules driven and you deal with large
of excellence, the subject matter
in that process. And so the real world
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U i PAT H
experts and the people that will lead
real problems, not “selling potential”.
the automation journeys forward within
“Recent events have kickstarted digital
each organisation, and ensuring what
transformation journeys for many
you’re developing is actually delivering
organisations, with remote working,
a return on investment and making
increased demand, or asudden burst
sure that people invest heavily in
in volumes pushing a lot of organisa-
the delivery.”
tions to think about automation. This
Following the COVID-19 outbreak,
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is something that UiPath is looking
Duddridge reiterates that the organi-
to help where it can, to drive innovation
sation is truly focused on helping solve
for business continuity.”
UI PAT H ’S G U I D I N G PRINCIPLES
THE BEST STRATEGY With the benefits and challenges of adopting an ‘automation first’ mindset,
• A robot for every person
Duddridge reflects on the industry and
• Pioneering an ‘automation first’ mindset liberating office employees from boring mundane tasks to focus on added-value work;
explains that the strategic approach
• The UiPath mission is to provide the best RPA technology platform to enable the ‘automation first’ enterprise; • Free access to training for all RPA roles (also the first RPA company to provide a free download version of its product).
for an effective adoption of automation has changed in recent times. “It used to be very varied in terms of how automation initiatives were created,” he comments. “An example of this is someone within the finance team deciding that vendor invoice management could be automated. That finance organisation could use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to retrieve the pertinent data from a document to break the back of 80% of its document ingestion and make its operations more agile. These kinds
“ Everything that can be automated, will be automated as long as it’s process led, rules driven and you deal with large volumes of data” — Chris Duddridge, Area Vice President and Managing Director, UiPath (UK and Ireland)
of organisations were our entry point into the market, but what we are now seeing are top down or bottom up strategies – sometimes both. For example, you will see CEOs of large banks talking about automation being a key pillar of their commitments, but you’ll also see citizen developers – regular employees – that are finding opportunities to make their work and the customer experience better. If people adopt that top down and bottom up approach it means that organisations will meet in the middle and always think about automation first.”
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A robot for every person: Benefit from automation at enterprise-wide Scale - UiPath CLICK TO WATCH
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INNOVATIONS AND TECHNOLOGY IMPLEMENTATIONS When it comes to innovation and technology implementations within automation, Duddridge sees the biggest benefit that has evolved being “collaboration of intra technology companies. Think about anyone in the market that is perceived as market leaders, these leaders have acquired RPA skills within their business because automation is a key component of their platform. But what we’ve seen is that with our open and free community of technology partners we haven’t had to roll out 50 different proprietary bits of technology because we can leverage our relationship with partners such as Microsoft, Service Now, SAP and Salesforce, which are open to work within a collaborative ecosystem to deliver really transformational customer outcomes.” Duddridge adds that “while perhaps with technological advancements within the automation industry cloud technology has been a key player for us, allowing us to stand up our infrastructure within AWS or Microsoft Azure in seconds, and while the advent w w w.ui pat h . com
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“ Recent events have kickstarted digital transformation journeys for many organisations, with remote working, increased demand, or a sudden burst in volumes pushing a lot of organisations to think about automation” — Chris Duddridge, Area Vice President and Managing Director, UiPath (UK and Ireland)
“across public and private sector clients in the UK and Ireland, innovation not only being an aspiration, but a necessity to find work arounds by
of cloud is not new, how we leverage
enabling technology at speed, and we
our relationships with cloud vendors is
felt compelled to help them, playing
truly transformational for businesses.
our part in mitigating the devastating
Most organisations are now looking
effects of the pandemic .” However, he
for cloud-ready technology that they
believes that while it has accelerated
can adopt quickly, knowing that you
the agenda it hasn’t changed anything,
tick every security box, compliance
and the technology remains the
box and regulatory box necessary.”
same. “The spirit of what we are trying
Other strategic additions to automa-
to achieve in getting software robots
tion Duddridge has seen in the last six
to take on the mundane rules-based
months include intelligent document
repetitive processes at speed and
understanding, some of which are AI and machine learning enabled, as well as OCR, process discovery, process mining, business process management and RPA.
POST-COVID-19 AND FIRST STEPS FOR THE INDUSTRY Reflecting on the industry since COVID-19, Duddridge has witnessed w w w.ui pat h . com
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“ W e can leverage our relationship with partners such as Microsoft, Service Now, SAP and Salesforce, which are open to work within a collaborative ecosystem to deliver really transformational customer outcomes” — Chris Duddridge, Area Vice President and Managing Director, UiPath (UK and Ireland)
2005
Year founded
$360mn Annual recurring revenue (2019)
3,000 Number of employees
scale, and allowing the employees to
that act as a contingency, or ensure
deliver value-added impactful work
that parts of the business that are
which will ultimately be transformative
a challenge to manage with a remote
for organisations remains the same.
workforce are address in the long term.�
At the moment everyone’s still dealing with contingency planning and keeping the lights on, but post COVID-19, I think automation will remain the biggest topic for making sure that, should something like this ever to happen again, there are provisions w w w.ui pat h . com
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